Not all the government/corporate forces are working against the rights and freedom of internet users. Unfortunately, it is usually just some lone judge, like this guy.
In a decision hailed by free-speech advocates, the Delaware Supreme Court on Wednesday reversed a lower court decision requiring an Internet service provider to disclose the identity of an anonymous blogger who targeted a local elected official.
Of course, when entering the public sphere, the people are legally entitled to critique. The judge of the superior court wrote that the internet is a “unique democratizing medium unlike anything that has come before,” and argued that setting the bar too low would stop people from their given right to communicate and critique anonymously. And, he also says what I have been thinking for a long time, that blogs and chatrooms serve the same function as early democratic pamphleteering.
The nature of such a zone of freedom as the internet (Siva calls it anarchistic) is that we shouldn’t resort to legal means to combat ideas which we don’t like. In an academic’s dream, what we have to do is make a better blog with better arguments than those we dislike. Ideally, in such decentralized networks, it is all about survival of the fittest, which, in this instance, is a movement of freedom. And this judge agreed:
Steele noted in his opinion that plaintiffs in such cases can use the Internet to respond to character attacks and “generally set the record straight,” and that, as in Cahill’s case, blogs and chatrooms tend to be vehicles for people to express opinions, not facts.
It is going to happen, in the not too distant future, when it won’t be the cultural norm to fight what we don’t like with legal means, if it is in the realm of ideas. Sure, we are still going to call the cops for murder and arson, but if someone we don’t like is making arguments, which are the hight of non-violence, we won’t respond with an agent of violence, i.e. the State, but with an attack of non-violence, our words.
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This entry was posted by Steven Chabot on Monday, October 24th, 2005, at 12:56 pm, and was filed in Politics.
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